h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Did you all accidentally publish the first draft instead of the finished version of this articles. In terms of copy editing it is quite substandard. I don't have a printout of it to hand, but I recollect the first paragraph containing a dangling element. I also noticed numerous run-on sentences and one case of verb-subject disagreement.

In terms of substance-editing, I think no attention was paid at all to the content.

As Mr. Thompson is himself a writer of some distinction and spleen, I do believe that, if he were aware of this, he would be outraged. Thompson has written some interesting sentences in his autobiographical stuff, but when he is acting as a reporter his work is immaculate.

This article needs to be cleaned up immediately. No smileys, I mean it.

Lil

Lil's right. I believe I've ranted elsewhere about the lack of proper copyediting in H2G2 entries before, but this entry is a particularly egregious example of the problem. You're trying to create a reference work here. It ought not be marred by "accepted" prose that wouldn't get a passing grade in any reasonable high school composition class.

Somewhere along the line, the H2G2 editorial process seems to be broken. You need to get someone with actual proper copyediting experience and training to look at each and every entry before it's posted in order to avoid continued embarassment.

I have revisited this article and see that the first several sentences have been re-edited. The rest of it, however, appears unaltered. I would like to make the following observations:

1. "thoughts and attitudes ... has" should be "thoughts and attitudes ... have".

2. "Upon realising that all reporters despise sports reporters that's where he pinned his flag,..."
[ellipses mine]
first clause not true.
should have comma before that's.
pinned his flag is a mixed metaphor. raised his flag? pinned his hopes?
"so he became sports editor at Eglin Air Force Base."
Eglin AFB is not a newspaper, it is a place. Should specify more closely. Ignores his broadcasting stint while there.

3. "After his discharge, there are still disputes about how honourable this was...."
run-on construction -- suggest comment should be paranthetical or construction changed
substance edit: This is a very strong accusation to make against any American service veteran, and if the author of this article knows who makes the insinuation, he had better cite that person in writing.

4. [moving on to next paragraph] "During the early 60's he hung around and got into scrapes with Hells Angels...." [ellipses mine]
Hells Angels should be Hell's Angels, as printed later on in same article.
substance: this sentence is so incomplete as to almost be untrue. HST joined the Hell's Angels for the express purpose of writing a book which is his first big classic, which is in fact the documentary that brought him to literary prominence. It's title is Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. I don't know the original date of publication.

"...he wrote books (including the Rum Diary, and moved to San Francisco in 1964."

unclosed parantheses
It would be worth mentioning what Rum Diary is about, surely.

5. I'll skip the next sentence, noting only that San Fran is not an accepted way of referring to San Francisco; there are many other nicknames to choose from, including some relevant to the 60's. The phrase 'upper boogaloo', however, is anachronistic.

6. "And Thompson met them all, Kesey, Wolfe, Ginsberg, he also did some fun stuff: participated in Kesey's first acid tests, introduced some Hell's Angels to LSD, and had a life-changing moment."

This is a run-on sentence which also contains an inapproriate use of a colon. I'll skip substance editing here and go on to the next paragraph.

7. "On a visit to the Chicago Democratic Convention he was assaulted by the downer cops, it was then he decided to strive, fight and write for change, he got political."
run-on sentence.
a. This wasn't just a visit, it was a writing assignment.
b. Doesn't this kind of, like, totally miss the point of what happened at the Democratic Convention in 1968? Hunter was already political. What happened at Chicago deserves a better description, however brief, than this.

8. Skipping over more of the article for this one last observation:
"The one piece of literature he is most well known for it is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
incorrect sentence construction.

And now I realize that I didn't check to see whether there was a bibliography.

Guide Editors, HST is one of my favorite authors, and I really wish you could take the time to fix this article up some more. Thank you.

Lil

Hi guys.

A quick point before I answer: I would ask you to bear that in mind that at h2g2 we are only human, we're providing you with a completely free service, and we strive to be nice. We would ask you to be the same and to try to avoid such comments as 'You need to get someone with actual proper copyediting experience and training to look at each and every entry before it's posted in order to avoid continued embarassment', which I find offensive. I might add that being offensive breaks our terms and conditions, but this is not a threat, so I will leave it at that.

Now that's over, thanks very much for your comments. Yes, there were plenty of problems with the entry, and I re-edited it myself over the weekend, before I had a chance to see your comments Lil (though you did a great job of subbing it). There are a few questions you might like to help me with, though, that are hopefully down to a lack of knowlegde on my part rather than a lack of copy-editing skills.

2. 'first clause not true' - does this mean Thompson didn't believe sports reporters were the bottom of the pile?

3. Is there absolutely no dispute over Thompson's discharge?

4. 'It would be worth mentioning what Rum Diary is about, surely' - indeed. Care to help us out by posting such a summary, then?

5. 'The phrase 'upper boogaloo', however, is anachronistic' - which is surely the point, no?

7. 'What happened at Chicago deserves a better description, however brief, than this' - so help us out. Remember the concept behind h2g2 - written by the people for the people? As you obviously know lots more about this, you can help rather than just criticise...

'And now I realize that I didn't check to see whether there was a bibliography' - feel free to write one.

With your input we can produce a much better entry. That's the point... but we have to start somewhere with every entry. We can't invent perfection out of thin air, you know.

Looking forward to getting your input on the above.

It's not my intention to harrass or cause offense; that's why I posted my comments here rather than appending them to the article, because I didn't want to cause the author or subed direct loss of face. As a matter of fact, I checked MarkyB out at his home page, but found no activity there since 22 weeks ago or thereabouts. If I spoke offensively at any point, I apologise, because editors need tact more than any other quality, and you clearly have plenty. >sigh< But I really care about credibility, too.

What, then, is the best way to diplomatically challenge an approved entry? The way I did here? It's my understanding -- from ffMike and Stragbasher -- that y'all get hundreds of emails a day just on the subject of article editing.

I have a couple of biographies of HST in the house, and I will get them out today and assemble a supplementary article to the one already approved, in which I will answer your comments. Then I'll come back here and post a URL to that article. I'll do this today -- but here and now, I can't resist adding that "upper boogaloo" is anachronistic in reverse: I'm not even exactly sure what it means except by context, but I meant that it's an almost jarringly modern adjectivial phrase. As you know, too much of a dose of conversational style can be, well, er, too much of a dose.

Personally, I think h2g2 is more than a free service run by nice humans; I think it's a fascinating and valuable sociological experiment. Leave the structure slack enough and watch the netizens devise their own ways of creating organization. Me, I come here every day. I hope y'all get a grant or something.

Thanks, Lil

I'm sorry you found the sentence in question offensive. It wasn't meant to be; it was a simple statement of my opinion. In general, I really do think the quality of copyediting here needs to be improved. I understand that you folks are overloaded but, as the saying goes, you should have realized there were alligators in the swamp before you went there. I'm quite aware of the terms of service, but I honestly do not think that sentence breaks them, or even bends them nearly as much as some of the other goings-on in comment threads (the occasional rampant homophobia, for example).

Be that as it may, of course it's your sandbox, and you may toss me out if you like. I do hope it doesn't come to that. It's probably come to your attention that I happen to think the idea of an open-sourced encyclopedia is a damned good one, and I've contributed a lot of my own time and energy to making it better. Part of that, for me, is writing the best guide entries that I can. Part of it is pointing out when I think things could be improved, or that you're falling down on implied promises to do a professional job.

I certainly don't expect perfection in every guide entry. I do expect, and I think it's reasonable to expect, that every approved guide entry start out without spelling or grammatical errors. That's the job of the editors, yourself included (the process being opaque from the outside, I have no idea how many people look at each entry before it's posted). Once that minimum standard is met, the entry can then be released for further research-based polishing, as excellently illustrated by the hard work that Lil is doing on this one.

Perhaps you have different notions. That's fine. Part of providing a forus is that you have to expect people to step up with their own opinions, too.

One last note: I am willing to put my money (literally: I write for a living) where my mouth is on this one, by helping make entries better before they're released on to the first page. I long ago offered my services as a sub-editor, and I'd still be happy to spend some time in that capacity.

Thanks for the replies, both of you: I'm glad that it's all OK really. And thanks for the offer of becoming a sub, too, ffmike - the next round of recruitment is just round the corner, so you won't have to wait long. We just have to ensure our infrastructure can cope with the influx, which is more difficult than one might think.

I only got ruffled feathers because you implied we hadn't had anyone with copyediting experience look at the piece, which is considerably different to commenting about the standard of the piece itself. The latter is perfectly OK and a fair point, but the former is personal and simply not nice. It's not your criticism of the subbing that worried me, just the way it was expressed: I'm a terminally nice guy, and I try to instill that in others, in this case through the community feel on h2g2.

But that's all history. Thanks for the offers of further work on the entry (which should be posted to the entry's forum and a note posted on Anna's page) and I hope this demonstrates that even if we get it wrong, at least we respond. And nicely, too.

Err... I went to the bookshelf where Hunter ought to be and found a hollow, leaning-over place. My brother has apparently borrowed my HST stuff, which places it in Virginia, about 5 states north and slightly to the right.

I apologize, but there will be a delay in keeping the promise I made earlier. But I will follow the instructions you've given.

I have also volunteered to sub-edit, but I think my offers are deeply embedded in one of Peta's forum threads....

Anyhow, thanks for the feedback. I know you're extremely busy, really, and I hope you're well over the flu.

Lil

Now Now -- I think we are overlooking the most wonderful and pervasive theory of publishing in the Guide -- it is not a normal publication.

Does the sign on Mark's mainpage still say "Missing, Presummed fed" (Hey lil, I think you should do him a plaque gif .... in live coppery colour, like the Plinth in Starship titanic .. Im sure he would Post it)

But I digress, the Guide if founded on the principal that more of the actual work (there beeing just ridicolous amounts of it) gets done by people who wander in when everyone else is out to lunch, as it were. And look at lil .. she wandered in, did some editing, and left it on the "desk" with a big angry note!

Eventually, someone will wander in, replete with a doggy bag, and will put them in.

I think its working just swimmingly!

~Beeblefish

Hi Lil and ffmike,

I was very interested to read this discussion, and it seems to me that there's also room for a Sub-Ed's take on the process - this might be especially useful to you if you want to join the club. It will help me in this that I wasn't involved in the original article (nor did I see it before Mark revised it).

When you receive a batch of work, there can be *anything* in it. There might be a report on a commercial product not available in your home country, one on a place you've never been to, a historical figure you've never heard of, even a poem. Some of these articles are written by people for whom English is clearly not their first language, or to whom it was not taught very well . A surprising (and disappointing) number of people submit articles without bothering to check their spelling, or that their sentences are complete and make sense.

Sometimes it's a challenge to make sense of the articles yourself, and in that respect this job is harder than copyediting for a magazine or book publisher, where the contributors are people with a background in writing, and the tweaks are mostly restricted to the odd style point or typo. Where possible, we try to keep the original author's prose, or at least its style or "flavour" - people want to feel it's "their" work, and that their efforts were worthwhile. Again, this is more important on H2G2 than where the contributor's being paid.

Then we come to the facts, and I can only relate my approach. Unless I have specific domain knowledge myself, and so long as they seem plausible, I generally let them stand. If I've never even heard of the topic, I'll pop to Alta Vista and try to find related information as background - and to make sure it hasn't been copied from elsewhere - but sometimes we have entries on topics that people don't think of writing about anywhere else, which is one of the joys of the project. In the case of a specific allegation against a living person (such as the one about HST's discharge), it's a good point that this should be thoroughly checked, if only to protect H2G2 from legal repercussions, and the Sub-Eds guide should reflect that.

As for the "conversational style" of some pieces, well, I often find it works. It reminds the reader that this isn't Encarta or Britannica. It often injects a dose of humour which, despite Mark's best efforts , is an inevitable feature of an Adams-inspired community. It makes the site more accessible - though hopefully without "dumbing it down".

Other than that, I'd just ask you to remember that Sub-Eds are volunteers. Almost all of us have jobs or studies which are objectively more important, but our belief in the project (and Anna-induced guilt ) keep us plugging away in the time we can spare. Until H2G2 proves a commercial smash, TDV can't commit the resources to pay people to do what we do, so you're stuck with us for now

Finally, please don't be afraid to post feedback in an article's forum - we Sub-Eds are still pretty low on the learning curve and feedback from the end reader is as valuable as from Mark and Anna. But please be gentle .

Gary

Don't worry about the volunteer threads Lil, I'm keeping track of them, and I am going to go all the way through them. Thanks for volunteering, we'll be onto this as soon as we can.

In his post above, Beeblefish describes me as having been angry; I think 'distraught' would have been more accurate, but you know how difficult it can be to convey feelings in forumspeak. Is there a subed's forum where these issues are regularly discussed? I think this is an awfully interesting post, Gary, and I appreciate your taking the time to tell me more about how it works.

If I personally found myself subediting an article with alien content that I couldn't corroborate in any regular reference, I think I would go back to the original author and ask for such reference. Same thing with passages that are difficult to make sense of. Authors have pride in their work and want to remain involved, I should hope. It shouldn't have to be your job to _guess_ what the truth or the sense of an article is; it's the author's job to tell you.

You are quite right about the proportion of informality being justifiably greater here than at other encyclopedic places. But I envision that, if I had batted my comment about "upper boogaloo" back to the author, he would have responded either with a defense or a workaround, and we would go on from there.

Perhaps there is not enough "we" in the h2g2 editing process as it stands; I say this hesitantly, not knowing how much latitude is given to individual subeds, or how each of them does their job. I base this comment, rather, on what I have heard from several authors concerning both rejections without accompanying markup and accepted articles with unexpected alterations.

Interactive editing takes a little longer, granted, but everybody is happier in the end. I very fully appreciate that volunteerism is a time-consuming thing, because I have edited newsletters on that basis in the past myself. But 'community' is a two-way street. I love living here, even if I complain about the length of the queues or the fact that the city planning department only seems to be open on alternate Tuesday afternoons....

Lil

Thanks for bringing up another important topic, Lil, the one about authorial feedback. This is a problem area for the Sub-Eds. Although the Powers That Be have everyone's e-mail address from when they registered, they take seriously the commitment not to reveal it - which includes not sending it to us. If we need to ask some questions, therefore, our only option is to post to a forum either on the article or on the author's home page.

Sadly, neither of these is particularly effective, because of the way that the "latest forum entries" work - the author only sees discussions to which s/he has already been party: it's a lousy way of grabbing someone's attention for something new. The more conscientious authors check their articles for comments regularly, and often incorporate changes suggested by other researchers; but then the conscientious ones aren't normally the problem .

There's another possibility which is even worse - the author has written and submitted an article, but isn't a regular visitor. Perhaps they lost interest because of the length of time before the article was even considered, but whatever the reason, they've gone - and just because we can't clarify things with them, we might have to reject the article. Getting the "We're sorry, your article was rejected" message probably isn't going to encourage them to come back, either.

The last drawback of editorial forum postings is that any "criticism" is public and permanent - much better to have it via private means. Maybe we have to ask Jim for a "mail question to the author" button on articles which only Sub-Eds can use, which wouldn't have to reveal their address to the sender.

A last word on "unexpected alterations": I was amused (well, I stopped short of pissed off) that "Arc de Triomphe" in my contribution to the Paris article was "corrected" to "Arc DU Triomphe". You just can't get the staff these days, can you Mark?

I have been following this debate with interest. A few questions. Are the subs appointed for life? Do the ones not up to scratch get dropped from the sub editing team. If not, why not?

In any group project some people are going to be better than others but, I believe, something more than just willingness to help is required from the sub editing team.

Assuming that we are talking about an article with a problem of substance:

My feeling is that if a subed can't get a response from the author when they ping him or her, then the article in question is neither accepted nor rejected. It remains pending indefinitely until said author responds. Meanwhile, the subed moves on to the next task.

If the author doesn't respond until that subed is only a memory, then his or her article goes to the next available sub, with any penalty that might imply for not paying attention.

Obviously, an article which meets standards can be passed to the editors for acceptance without the need for an author's rewrite.

From now on, when I submit an article I'm going to post a forum note to myself from that page. That way I can be aware of any comments and criticisms. That of course is a workaround, and I agree with you that we authors need some standard way of being kept up to date on comments.

But I can well appreciate why a subed might want to keep their comments to the author private; some kind of pigeonhole system would be a great idea. I entirely endorse the team's policy of keeping email addresses private. Somebody with more technical savvy than I (a very large subset) may have suggestions as to how that could be done.

I think the percentage of researchers likely to treat their subed badly is small, as long as there is some interactivity in the process. And if there is misbehavior, well, the staff have the last word, yes?

*Beeblefish moves off to the side whistling, waiting for fur to fly*

Great idea about the special Subbie button GVI, it would solve a lot of problems, and make life less strifeful for disgruntled authors, and less taxing for subbies. And it circumvents the email annonymity problem. If I may add to this idea, it would not be bad if rejection letters came with the email adress of the one doing the rejecting, so that a rebutal may be made/questions answered, if the author feels the need to start such a dialogue.

~Beeblefish

There's very much room for a sub-ed's take, of course. In fact, I'm extremely happy to have you providing one. To wax philosophical for a moment, I think some Researchers at least would benefit from a bit more openness to the process, which you're providing. Hopefully there's no NDA associated with being a sub-editor.

I wonder if it might help the process if the sub-editors had the right to reject an entry that they didn't feel qualified to work on?

I'm not surprised that you get many entries that are sub-standard in their use of the language. Being a part-time editor myself for several computer magazines I'm all too familiar with this problem. Too many people today just never learn the rudiments of spelling and grammar, let alone prose style (probably they're not taught). So, that's the first part of your job, and the easy part to focus on: copyediting (which is also the problem with this particular entry that bothered me the most). Ideally I'd like to see the subs catch and fix basic mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. I recognize that individual authors have individual voices, but I would draw the line where that voice depends on just wrong usage. I believe there's an implied understanding in submitting an entry that it could be edited. People who don't want their deathless prose touched shouldn't be submitting it to an edited forum.

Fact-checking is a much knottier problem. Here you're clearly more dependent on the Researcher to get things write, or the other denizens of the Guide to catch problems after an entry is approved. It looks to me as if perhaps the Guide's management expected the give-and-take before submission and approval to perform this task, but (except in rare cases) I don't think that's happening. On the other hand, I have seen several problems caught after approval, so at least the readers are vigilant.

Finally, I want to address the question of feedback, which you raise briefly and which comes up again later in the thread. I think one of the structural problems of the current system is that it does not allow feedback between the sub-editor and the researcher. The idea of a way to send anonymized email back to the researcher is a good one. Another thing that would help would be for the notification system to take on the task of letting researchers know that there are comments on an entry. I finally had to write myself a utility to scan entries for comments, inasmuch as I've got over a hundred entries to keep track of now. I'm hoping the pending redesign will do something to alleviate this particular problem.

More traditional publishing involves an author review stage after editing. When I submit an article to one of the computer magazines, I get the chance to review galleys after it's edited but before it's printed. I would like to see something of the sort implemented here. This would prevent errors such as the one in my article on the crescent wrench, which some person apparently unfamiliar with tools decided to equate with the monkey wrench. Yes, it would be more work for the guide's technical staff to set this up, but I think (at least for the researchers who really care about their work) that it would improve the quality of entries.

Perhaps the only point where I disagree with you is in cutting the sub-editors slack because they're volunteers. Yes, they are, and I do remember that. But I don't believe that's any excuse for doing a poor job. H2G2 should take advantage of volunteer labor, and has certainly gotten some excellent help by doing so, but it should also recognize that some people will volunteer for jobs that they're not capable of doing. There needs to be a way to review the performance of sub-editors, help them correct problems, and (in the worst case) to remove someone from the post if it turns out that they just can't do the work properly. I hope that a commitment to niceness will not preclude dealing with this sort of situation realistically.

ffmike, you're quite right, our main function is to ensure grammar, spelling and logical flow (along with marking up the entry as necessary in GuideML). We often cut the odd sentence which may be repetitive or superfluous, and I don't think anyone has a problem with that. Perhaps we're making a mistake in going further to try to "save" flawed but promising articles, but I think that's a good failing, trying to bring out the positive aspects of everyone's contribution. Remember too that we all started out as (and are still) researchers, so we know how frustrating it can be from the other side!

The reason for not holding onto articles pending authorial feedback (to answer Lil's point), is that we get assigned work in batches of ten. By far the easiest way to manage them is to return complete batches. I'd hate to have to start a card-indexing system with notes on of entries I haven't looked at for ten weeks.

I'm not in favour of dropping subs until it has become clear that they can't learn and adapt to the job, and I think that would have to take longer than any of us have been in the job so far - and the sub themselves would probably realise it and quit anyway. The word on the street is that the next wave of subs will be offered a bit more "example-driven" training rather than the on-the-job type the early entrants got - and that's mostly because of feedback we've given on our experiences.

The other main point to make is that, whatever the subs return to them, the editorial team retain full responsibility for what actually gets released as an official entry. They can and often do change what we have subbed, and I'm sure Mark wouldn't want some poor sub to take the flak alone for a weak article when a paid employee has had their hands on it afterwards - but even () TDV staffers are humans who have off-days and Friday afternoons and 'flu. Treat them as you'd like to be treated, point out their mistakes kindly and let them correct them with their pride intact, then we'll get the best Guide humanly possible - and have fun along the way.

I'm always glad to talk about the process by which we work, and I haven't heard anything that says it's a secret (well, not since the whole scheme was a secret ). Of course problems with a particular entry are kept between editor and author, no-one wants their dirty washing done in public. The Powers That Be are also ever-receptive to suggestions which can make things work better. I've had a lot of ideas, and made a lot of mental notes, as a result of this discussion - thanks everyone for making me think!

GVId wrote:

The reason for not holding onto articles pending authorial feedback (to answer Lil's point), is that we get assigned work in batches of ten. By far the easiest way to manage them is to return complete batches. I'd hate to have to start a card-indexing system with notes on of entries I haven't looked at for ten weeks.

My response:

You shouldn't have to start a card-indexing system. The point I would continue to defend here is that IF an article has "problems" (and that's obviously a debate in itself), and IF the author doesn't respond to pinging by the subed, then that article should NOT be accepted. I'm arguing for 3-valued logic here, accepted, rejected and null. If you don't want to hang on to an unresolvable article then it should go to the bottom of the article mountain, after a pre-specified (in submission guidelines) waiting period.

In other words, I'm still arguing for interactivity and for more responsibility to be shared back to the author. Did you notice how many active researchers used their journals to tell everybody that they would be away for a given period over the hols? As opposed to the ones who say nothing at all for months. Just as my real-life neighbour tells me if he's going to be gone for a period, as opposed to the one whose house goes strangely quiet for days. Once you submit an article, haven't you made a commitment of a kind to the village? And in that case, shouldn't you be accountable for the content?

I find my position in this interesting debate evolving as I learn more from you about how it works and how the subeditors think. If I had understood the process at the get-go, I would have written a more restrained forum posting to begin with. When you see a typo in my postings you know I've been hasty

Lil

(On re-reading prior to posting this entry it appears a little 'rude'. Apologies for the tone, and don't let it put you off. I'm in a splendid mood today and am not emotionally involved. Perhaps someone could set up a writing class to help people like me get their points across more effectively?)

Mark,

I'm glad to note that you're a nice guy. Is that the only quality required of an editor?

I'm not trying to be unkind here - I've just reread the "welcome" page, written by you, and I think it's excellent so I guess you're good at that side of the job - but for a while there you seemed to be responding to 'feedback' by getting defensive.

As I sent you an angry email recently, and it was apparently one of 700 this month, I can understand that you're feeling a little put-upon - but there is a real issue here and I can't think of any way of dealing with it other than getting it out in the open.

As I read the comments above the issue is not whether you personally can write or edit, but whether the sub-editor system is working.

I was contacted a while back by a sub who had some of my stuff to edit. We talked, he made his points, I made mine, and he rejected some of my entries. I don't have a problem with this and we continue to correspond. (Unlike some authors I put a "mailto" on my homepage. Why not give everyone an author@h2g2 address that forwards to their real address?)

Another sub destroyed one of entries, without asking me what I thought. I've initiated correspondence with him and you (Mark) and, although I don't seem to be getting my point across, I remain hopeful. The problem could be that I'm not communicating clearly but, in any case, this is not the place to discuss that entry. I'm just illustrating with my own experiences.

Asteroid Lil has seen an entry on a subject that is important to her, and tried to start some dialogue. She's taking issue with both content and presentation and we need to discuss the subjects separately.

Presentation first: Nobody's perfect, and few of the unpaid volunteers who contribute to the guide have your skills or experience. It's to be expected that the standard of english leaves something to be required, but for the guide to function as a guide it needs to be properly written. We, the researchers, are assuming that the editorial process exists to ensure that standards are maintained and I don't think anybody is out of order if they get upset at seeing a poorly written entry being approved. Granted Lil may have gone over the top a bit but I know that this issue has been niggling her for a while, and what she says is valid.

Now, content: It's fair to expect researchers to make reasonable efforts to ensure that everything they publish is accurate. The author may have skimped a bit on the original entry, but we're not talking about the original entry. The original "has been used as the basis for an entry entitled" and is now the responsibility of the editor. It is up to the editor, or editorial team, to ensure that the article is accurate and up to date, which is why the rant was directed here.

You seem to have accepted the substance of Lil's complaints, and thrown a challenge to her to rewrite the entry. As I understand the system, all revisions and updates are supposed to be posted in forum entries. Isn't that what they're there for? I proposed some amendments to the semi-approved version of one of my entries recently and was told that they will have to wait until the next revision.

When will that be? The queue for approval doesn't seem to be getting any shorter and it's hard to imagine that the subs are going to find time to wade through all those discussions about the weather, TV, limericks etc., to find the relevant comments and update the guide within my lifetime.

So if we stick to the system Lil is going to do your job for you and the results will languish in a forum somewhere waiting for the guide's IPO, at which point I presume you'll cash in your share options and retire.

As we (researchers, sub's, aces) are all doing this without any financial interest can I suggest that you stop to consider our motivations for getting involved and ask what reward we are seeking? Recognition, perhaps? Being involved with something worthwhile usually brings out the best in people, and they often react to defend against anything that undermines or threatens "their" baby. (You do keep telling us it's "our" guide, after all.)

I expect that your job is going to consist of a great deal of this kind of thing if you can't find a way to ensure that we all get to be associated with quality, rather than stuff that people are going to take issue with.

So no more Mr Nice Guy, OK? We want a tough editor who's going to say "this is good enough", not only to researchers, but also to the people who edit their stuff.

All the best.
Chris